PREFACE: This blog post is one in a series of articles that Portentites produced in a pair-writing experiment. It's a little more broad than usual because it represents two subject matter experts from different practice areas, coming together to combine their knowledge for a broader look at the internet marketing topics that face real businesses. If you're not familiar with pair writing, GatherContent does a great job of introducing the topic. We hope you enjoy it.
Alright, deep breath. It's time to set up your business’s internet presence. And while you aren’t a Porg, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the internets love you too.

You win, Disney. I cant even with this thing.

1: HTTPS: SECURITY AND TRUST FOR PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMERS
A question: "Should my site be HTTP or HTTPS?"
There are a number of compelling reasons to pick HTTPS. First, think of that extra “S” at the end as _security_ in the mind of your customer. Your customers, just like you, want to be secure when they visit a website. Google, with its Chrome browser, overtly labels whether a website is secure or not both in the address bar and on SERPs.

If you have login functionality, accept credit cards, or even form submissions, HTTPS is essential. Google very publicly considers this a best practice, but really what do _they_ know…oh right we want to rank there!
So Google likes it, it keeps your info private, it keeps your users’ info private, and it future-proofs your site. Winner, winner.
2: ROBOTS.TXT & SITEMAP
Stick with me, we're going to get a little technical. But don’t worry we're not going to write code together, yet…maybe. Instead, you're simply going to help search engines find your site.
Honestly, you're just being really nice and giving them directions to where on the site they're allowed to go. A handy little map of your site.
First, we're going to create a file on your root domain (like a tree down in the roots). That map is going to tell search engines if we have any pages or areas on the site we don’t think they should go, so we minimize the search engine's chance of getting lost. And we're going to tell them where to find the map.
It will look something like this:
https://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt
We have a robots.txt guide with best practices and several common mistakes. This should help you troubleshoot any errors you find. Better yet, you might learn how to avoid the most common mistakes _before_ making them.
Next up is the sitemap! There are a lot of free sitemap generator tools out ther. Most will only crawl 500 pages and generate a map from what they find. The xml sitemap file will live at the root just like the robots.txt file, but it will _also_ be listed in your robots.txt:
https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
And the location will be spelled out in your robots.txt file like so:
User-agent: *
Sitemap: https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
3: GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE & BING WEBMASTER TOOLS
Now you have a sitemap living on your site and recorded in your robots.txt file, so search engines will be falling all over themselves to get traffic to your site. _Right?? _
Well…not quite. Search engines are getting smarter but they still need a little help finding the front door. Or any door really. Just like making the map itself with robots.txt, you are going to be _very_ kind and let the search engines know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you gave them a map.
Setting up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the perfect nexus of easy and free. While both search engines provide guides to site owners on how to get started and fully set-up, they are best summed up as:
* Sign up for free account
* Submit your website
* Use the free tools
Once you've signed up for both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you'll need to upload your sitemap to both as well. For Google you'll use a separate, handy-dandy submission tool while Bing has you submit your site the same way that you submitted your robots.txt file above.
4: MAKE SURE YOUR SITE IS BLAZING FAST
One of the most important and often-overlooked facets of your website’s performance is site speed. Site speed can make or break your website, and a slow website can be disastrous for both converting prospective customers, and convincing search engines to show you in their results.
But you don't have to take our word for it alone. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Forty Percent. That is a massive amount of potential traffic lost to a single, solvable problem.
Some improvements are incredibly easy to do such as image compression. By compressing your images to be a smaller file size, there will be less to load on each page. Less to load = faster site. It's that simple.
If you haven't checked out any of the other links, we wrote a massive guide to site speed and page speed. That's broken down into chapters depending on what kind of technical support you have on staff or on retainer.
5: SITE NAVIGATION
Time for another easy win. Well.._mostly easy_ but definitely all _win_. Navigation is used by prospects, customers, and SEARCH ENGINES to get around your site. The ultimate test: it should make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.
Navigation doesn’t just magically do that though!
Global Navigation which is at the top of each page sends really strong signals to both users and to search engines of what your site is about. What questions they could answer by visiting. If you use vague, interchangeable language that tells people little about what you offer or what makes your business special, you're wasting a great opportunity to increase qualified traffic.
Order your navigation links and anchor text by importance from left to right. Ensure the text of the link is _highly_descriptive. (Psst “Products” is not descriptive. However, “LandSpeeder Cars” is!)
6: SET UP YOUR TITLE TAGS AND META DESCRIPTIONS
Once you have your website ready to rock, it’s time to get it in front of the eagerly awaiting populace. But before your site's going to show up on a Google results page, you'll have to decide what you want that to look like, and what kinds of searches you want to show up for.
The different parts of the listing are called the title tag and the meta description.
Title Tags are exactly what they sound like: The title of the listing on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
The "meta description" is that brief description or preview of your site content that shows up under the clickable title. Title tags especially are incredibly important as they play a huge part in determining how your website ranks for any given Google search.
For example: say you’re making a website that sells lightsabers.
When writing the title tags and meta descriptions, you'll want to make sure you include words that make it CRYSTAL clear what you are selling. Ideally, you'll match the language and jargon of your title as closely as possible to the language your customers would use to search for your product.
For instance, your customers might head to Google and type something like “jedi lightsabers” or “sith lightsabers” more than "sith saber". Using the terms that most align with your customers' thinking and language is a great way to improve visibility and clicks.
An important distinction: While you want to be descriptive and clear, do NOT stuff your title tags and meta descriptions with the keywords just because you know that the word shows up in a lot of searches. Doing spammy things like this can reflect negatively on your brand to prospective customers. And Google's been wise to this trick for many years, so there's literally no upside to shoe-horning in a dozen instances of the same word.
7: N.A.P. IN YOUR SCHEMA
Remember when we said we weren’t writing code yet, but maybe later? Well we got there finally. Cringe away, but don't stop reading.
It's a truly teeny amount of code, and we're going to use a tool to help you do it. (Tell no one and take all the credit!)
Put simply, "Structured Data" lets search engines understand your website better. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex agreed on a shared vocabulary to use a while back. We're simply going to use that specific vocab to help them understand your site better.
This is where our secret weapon comes in, Google's Structured Data Markup Helper (long name for such a helpful tool).
You'll be given two different options for the output: Microdata (the tool defaults to this) and JSON-LD.
Microdata will be attached to your html. Google will give you back the html code and highlight it so you (or a helpful developer) can see exactly where it goes in the code for your site. If you use JSON-LD, the code is also provided and goes into the "head" section of your page.
(Pssst, we also have a guide to implementing JSON-LD on your site. What can we say, we like to be helpful too.)
I’m using my current restaurant obsession in Seattle's International District as our example. (I have a serious dumpling addiction)
I’ll be giving you the JSON-LD code because it is smaller and easier honestly. We could fill the entire article with html code and just highlight where the microdata would go…

Looks scary, until you realize that its all done for you in the tool. Copy & Paste time.

8: GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
One of the most important determinants of success with search engines is maximizing the amount of space you occupy on a results page. This sounds over-simple, but it's true. Beyond giving more specific information to suit all the different questions users might have had from store hours to available inventory, the more space on a search results page that you occupy, the less space there is for the next competitor to show up.
One product that helps in this regard is Google My Business. Now, you may not recognize "Google My Business" by its formal tool name (I didn’t either), but you most certainly have seen it in the wild.
When you search for a business on Google, it’s powering that great big name and logo on the right side of the screen.

Taking the time to use this tool and effectively claim your business gives you much more real estate to work with than just traditional search listings, so it is incredibly helpful when setting up an internet presence. This is especially true for cases where people are already familiar enough to search for your business by name.
Fortunately, setting up a Google My Business account is incredibly easy. All you have to do is go to the My Business home page, create an account, enter your businesses information, and voila! You now have My Business Page.
People will now be able to see core information about your business right on the results page, which will help increase your visibility and qualified traffic.
9: FULLY SET UP SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS
After you've got your website setup and are heading down the path of optimization (SEO is a long game), it’s time to think about social if you haven't already. If you ask a random sample of people what social media sites are "the best", you may get a random sample of answers: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest.
We'd like to make this easy and effective for you, not to mention that this is a MASSIVE topic, so for now we'll stick with just one recommendation: only use social media that you will _actually use._
Social media can be a fantastic tool to help expand your reach and grow your business, but only when it is actually used as the communication tool that it is. Meaning if you don't manage it, you're creating just another empty space that can distract from channels where you're keeping information current, engaging with customers, etc. You start to see how setting up a social media account for your business and not using it can actually take away from your bottom line.
10: SET-UP GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Once you have the raw material of your site, your social media accounts, and perhaps some paid search or other ads, it's time to evaluate what's paying off, and how much.
Maybe you notice your phone ringing a little more, but if you have many new promotional efforts running at once, it’s impossible to know which are working without the proper measurement tools. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics is a free (!!) platform that allows you to track just about every aspect of your website. Did that spike in visitors come from an ad or an organic search engine result? What site referred that great customer to you? What did the rest of your visitors do once they hit your site?
Whether it's pageviews, conversions, or referral source, Google Analytics tracks everything. This allows you to make much more informed decisions regarding your website, your marketing, and improving your results proactively.
For a platform that can show you so much, and which costs literally $0.00, it takes next to nothing to get it set up. After setting yourself up with a Google Analytics account, there are only three broad but basic steps remaining:
* On the Admin page, under the Properties tab, click on “Create a New Property”
* Enter all of your website data to get your custom GA tracking code
* Paste the following snippet right after the head tag on each page you would like to track.
Do make sure to replace “GA_Tracking_ID” with the custom ID you got in step two above. And if you'd like a more detailed walkthrough, Moz provides a great 101-level intro to Google Analytics including sample business questions you might want to answer.
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
You've got a site that's far more visible than it was when you started. Your site is loading in half the time it was before. You've picked out a social media platform that fits your style and your schedule. And you know where the heck all that traffic is coming from, not to mention which parts of the traffic is converting into leads or customers.
When you're ready to lean into that faster, more effective site, looking at how to advertise successfully in paid search (PPC) or paid social media is a great way to show up at the moments your prospective customers are considering a product or service like yours.
Until next time, happy Marketing from all of us here at Portent!

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: REACH and BRAND AWARENESS. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.
Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.
WHAT WE'RE SEEING ON THE PLATFORM AND HEARING FROM FACEBOOK REPS
Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.
On the flip side, this does make it a _lot_ easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.
Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. _“We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.”_ (Kidding, mostly.)
Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a GREAT job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.
A SIDE OBSERVATION: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from _‘Facebook Marketing Experts’_ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.
Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.
What that blog post did _NOT_ discuss is also important: What about the 10+ _other_ advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?
Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately brand affinity exist in just two of the objectives they offer?
Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.
SO WHO SEES MY ADS ON FACEBOOK IF I STILL OPTIMIZE FOR ENGAGEMENT?
I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).
This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.
Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re _relatively_ more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in _clicking_, they’re going to see your ad.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER FOR ADVERTISERS?
This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.
Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.
While engagement and page likes may have been _the_ metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.
In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.
SOME OBSERVATIONS: WHY THE SHIFT IN MEASUREMENT AND BEHAVIOR?
_TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook._
Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. _(YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)_
Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.
Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.
The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.
It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.
Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the _most_ relevant click-through to a website.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF FACEBOOK ADVERTISING: SOME WILD GUESSES
_TL;DR. - Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization._
Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.
Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior _and_ advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)
BUSINESSES WILL FIGURE OUT THE “CLICK-HAPPY” PARADOX
They'll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.
USERS WILL CONTINUE TO FLEE THE MAIN NEWS FEED
Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.
Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.
ADVERTISERS WILL NEED TO INVEST MORE TIME ON THEIR CREATIVE
At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} _lesser_ creative. It's a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we're demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.
We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw 'em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.
Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review
The post Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics appeared first on Portent.

If you have any hand in the content on your company's website or your clients’ websites, it’s important that data informs your decisions. Otherwise, you risk creating content that doesn’t meet your audience’s needs. But knowing this will only get you so far-it’s even more important that you know how to find and interpret the _right_ data.
For many of us content folks, the idea of analyzing data can be intimidating. I know it was to me. But after learning the basics of Google Analytics, I warmed to the idea. Using data made my client recommendations stronger, and I felt more confident standing behind those recommendations.
Having ideas is great. Having ideas backed by numbers is even better.
Thanks to our analytics team, I learned about 4 reports in Google Analytics that made me a better content strategist. If you don’t have an in-house analytics strategist or you just want to understand a few things to kickstart your journey to data-informed content, I’ll show you how, when, and why to use these reports.
1. BEHAVIOR FLOW REPORT
WHAT: The Behavior Flow Report shows the path users traveled from one page or event to the next. You can use it to see what content keeps users engaged with your site.
WHERE: You can find it under BEHAVIOR > BEHAVIOR FLOW

HOW: Although it’s important to look at metrics that show us how people interact with our content, we also need to look at what happens _after_ people read our content to determine whether or not it’s helping us reach our business goals. The Behavior Flow Report is an excellent way to figure this out.
THE REPORT WILL LOOK SOMETHING LIKE THIS:
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say I want to know whether the Portent SERP Preview Tool is leading to any contact form submissions. I would right-click on “Portent SERP Preview Tool” and click “Highlight traffic through here.”

Next, I would look at 1st interaction and notice where people go after they click on the SERP tool. After clicking on the group details for (>100 pages), we can see that our “Contact” page received 3.4K sessions after people click on the SERP tool.

If our primary goal is to have more people fill out the “Contact Us” submission and we think 3K is too low of a number, we may want to determine a way to make the “Contact Us” CTA more prominent on the page. If you’re wondering what the drop-off rate is (I know I was), this is just a proxy for Exit % for people who leave from that page without doing anything else on the site. But how is it different from the Bounce Rate? The only difference is that users could have seen a page previous to the one they left on.
2. ASSISTED CONVERSIONS
WHAT: The purpose of the content on your site isn’t only to educate your users, it’s also to build trust and get people to do business with you. One way to tell if your content succeeds in this is to use the Assisted Conversions Report.
WHERE: To get to this report, go to CONVERSIONS > MULTI-CHANNEL FUNNELS > ASSISTED CONVERSIONS

HOW: If you haven’t already, you’ll need to set up specific goals in GA, which could include objectives such as newsletter subscriptions, ebook downloads, or visits to a specific landing page.
These goals should indicate actions you want your users to take when they visit your website and map back to your KPIs. If you want to learn more about what to track, read Ian Barrett’s blog post The Three Levels of Analytics Conversions You Need.
Once you’ve set up your goals, you can look at the data to see which landing pages helped you achieve those goals. And once you have that knowledge, you can determine if you should create similar content or find ways to optimize poorly performing content.

This report can also help you identify which content types perform best on what channels.

Here’s what you’ll see when you click on the Assisted Conversions Report:
Next, click on “Other,” type in “Landing Page,” and click on “Landing Page URL.”

From here you can see a list of the top landing pages that assisted in conversions. Here’s an example from Portent’s Assisted Conversions Report:
To pare this report down to specific conversions, use the drop-down list under “Conversion” in the upper left-hand corner of the report.

If you skip this step, it will be difficult to see meaningful down-funnel conversions such as signups and leads.
Note that we haven’t set up conversion values yet. If you have all the business numbers to do so, it will give you an additional way to evaluate your landing pages.
From this data, we can see that the “SERP Preview Tool” and “Portent Technical SEO Best Practices” landing pages performed a lot of assisted conversions. With this knowledge, we might create paid search or social ads to the “SERP Preview Tool” or write more technical SEO content on our website.
3. SITE SEARCH
WHAT: Not every site has search functionality, but if yours does you should use the data from the site search report to glean information about your users. As _Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond explains_:

“Through search-log analysis…we can gather useful data on what users actually want from your information environment (in the form of search queries). Over time, you can analyze this valuable data to diagnose and tune your search system, other aspects of its information architecture, the performance of its content, and many other areas as well.”

The Site Search Report will help you discover which concepts users are searching for frequently. Then you can compare those terms to the content on your site to decide if your content is effectively answering your users’ questions.
WHERE: To get to this report, go to BEHAVIOR > SITE SEARCH > SEARCH TERMS

HOW: When you click on “Search Terms,” you can find the words and phrases your users plugged into your search box. You can see every query, as well as metrics such as total unique searches, % of search exits, and time after search. These metrics will help you determine whether or not people are finding what they want.
The number of search refinements in the report and the number of times a user searches for something that’s in your primary navigation could indicate that your site navigation needs reworking. And just as I mentioned in the retailer example above, it can help you decide which products to feature prominently on category pages, etc.
Let’s pretend you’re an online clothing retailer who’s trying to decide what content types to feature on your website. You pull the Site Search Report and notice “Rompers,” “Turtlenecks,” and “Fall leggings,” have a high amount of search volume and only exist as product display pages on your site.
Based on the number of searches they both receive, you might decide that you want to add a sub-navigation label for “Rompers” or a blog post about “Fall leggings.”
When it comes to using the Site Search Report there are many possibilities. Just don’t forget to use it! I’ve found this is one of the more underutilized reports in content strategy.
4. LANDING PAGE REPORT
WHAT: This report shows you the most popular landing pages on a website. It also includes additional data such as pages per session, bounce rate, and average session duration. It’s the most obvious out of all of these but because it gives me a quick glance at the highest performing content, it’s the report I use the most.
WHERE: You can find this report under BEHAVIOR > SITE CONTENT > LANDING PAGES

HOW: Set your date range to anywhere from a month to a year. It’s up to you to choose which dates you pull (this can depend on factors such as how much traffic your site receives or if you just did a sign redesign).
Next, look at the top landing pages to discover what content on your site receives the highest number of sessions. Then, look at the pages themselves to see if they address topics that warrant additional content on your site.
THE REPORT WILL LOOK SOMETHING LIKE THIS:
For example, at Portent one of our top landing pages is “Pay Per Click Management Explained.” This page has a high number of sessions and an average session duration of 1:21, which indicates that it resonates with our audience. It’s lengthy and broken into different sections, such as “Why PPC Advertising Can Be Challenging” and “PPC Tools You Need to Know About.”
HIGHLY ACTIONABLE TIP: If I looked at our blog and discovered that we didn’t have any posts on either of those related sub-topics, I could immediately guide our PPC team to write about them.
There are many other reasons to use the Landing Page Report, but I recommend looking at it before your next ideation brainstorm.
Google Analytics can be complicated, but these reports are an excellent way to get your feet wet. I hope they inspire you to start using data to inform your content decisions. Play around with them and figure out how else you can use them at your organization!
This post was a team effort led by Katie McKenna on Portent’s Content Team with contributions from Ian Barrett of Portent’s Analytics Team. They love breaking down silos.
The post Talk Data to Me: Google Analytics Tips That Lead to Better Content Strategy appeared first on Portent.

I recently developed a comprehensive questionnaire to determine if it's worthwhile to move your site to HTTPS if you haven't already. If you can answer "YES" to _any_ of the following questions, we highly recommend making the switch.
* Do you have a website?
Wait, what? Only _one_ question?!? So you're saying…
That's right. If you have a website, it should be on HTTPS. Period. The End. OK OK, maybe not _every_ website. If you have a website that you do NOT want people to find, use, and trust, then you don't need HTTPS. But something tells me you do.
TRUST
The key component here is trust. While encrypting the connection between your site and your users definitely improves security, it's not a magical force-field that will protect your site from getting hacked. But, if implemented properly, it will garner trust in your users. There is comfort in the glowing green padlock ().
Without HTTPS, browser providers like Google and Apple will start taking an active role in tarnishing this trust, and it will start with Chrome. Over a year ago, Google announced its intention to move towards a more secure web, and without hesitation started shouting alarmingly at users about the lack of security on non-HTTPS websites.
Google Chrome makes up almost 60% of the entire web browser market (58% in October 2017 according to w3schools.com), so this is a big deal.
HOW CAN I MIGRATE TO HTTPS?
In order to move to HTTPS, an SSL certificate has to be installed at the public-facing layer of your site's infrastructure. This layer can be a mixed bag of technologies depending on your setup. It could be a webserver like Apache, NGINX, or Windows IIS, a load balancer, a CDN, a caching technology like Varnish, or something else.
_So, what's best for my site?_? That question may be best answered with this question: _What technical resources do I have available?_
If you're a developer and already have experience working in linux, I would recommend looking at letsencrypt.org. Let's Encrypt is a _free_, automated, and open certificate authority. I've set it up myself numerous times and highly recommend it.
If you're not a developer but tech savvy and comfortable managing your cPanel or other hosting interface, you could install an SSL cert on your own. This requires purchasing an SSL cert from a provider and following the install instructions on your hosting management system.
If that still sounds fairly daunting, you might be able to have your hosting company handle it for you.
More than likely, you'll still want support from a developer.
WHILE THESE ARE SOLID OPTIONS, MY FAVORITE AND MOST RECOMMENDED OPTION IS IMPLEMENTING CLOUDFLARE. Cloudflare offers DNS management, SSL encryption, and a worldwide CDN… for _FREE_. It's a ridiculous offer and checks off a lot of "easy win" boxes for your site and its performance. This is the route I chose for portent.com in mid-2017 and it's been awesome. Their monthly pay packages offer a lot of cool technologies that continue to push the envelope on site performance, while their base offerings include DNS and built-in firewall security, the worldwide CDN, and free SSL, which in most common cases, is all of about $79 per year.
PRE-LAUNCH CHECKLIST
Once you have SSL installed, prep your site for the migration. Here's a quick list of common tasks that should be addressed.
DON'T FORGET TO REDIRECT
Before flipping the switch to HTTPS, make sure your redirects are in order. Add a cardinal redirect for all HTTP traffic to HTTPS. Update all existing redirects to point to their HTTPS counterpart to avoid redirect hops.
FIX MIXED CONTENT
Mixed content is when there are HTTP asset references (images, css, js, etc.) on an HTTPS URL. The latest modern browsers will warn you when this is happening by either not showing the magic-glowing-green-lock-of-comfort, or showing an open lock, or something along those lines. You should be vigilant about fixing mixed content issues because of the trust impact (described above), made even more urgent by the increased warnings from browsers.
This is probably a pre- and post-launch checklist item, as it requires prepping your code in advance and planning the steps for updating your CMS content once live. Scour your site and code for HTTP references. Inspect console in Google Chrome on all of your major pages. Mixed content warnings will look like this:
UPDATE LINKS
Update all of your HTTP links to HTTPS. Again, this is more of a post-launch item, but planning should be done beforehand so you're not scrambling to figure out how to change links after going live. If your site has lots of pages, it's going to be difficult to test every page by hand. I wouldn't recommend it. Use a tool to crawl your site to find HTTP references. Utilize a search-and-replace extension/module/plugin if available. Perhaps have your developer run replace functions on the content database.
TIP FOR WORDPRESS USERS: Use the "Search Regex" plugin to find and replace HTTP URLs.
IN SUMMARY
You want to be proactive about this. It's only a matter of time until the next Chrome update starts displaying the red exclamation warning message on all non-HTTPS pages or pages with mixed content. Stay ahead of the curve and adopt HTTPS now. There really is no going back.
The post Time to Adopt HTTPS appeared first on Portent.

_In my Mozcon presentation this year, I talked about Markdown. I've had a few people ask about my toolset, so here's how I install and use Atom to write Markdown. Enjoy._
Atom is fast becoming my new favorite text editor. It handles Markdown beautifully, is great for HTML, runs faster than stink, and has great community support. It's also free.
Here's how you install Atom and set it up as a full-featured Markdown editor:
_Note: I'm doing this all on a Mac. I've included Windows commands where relevant. I hope._
INSTALLING ATOM
Easy-peasy:
* Visit Atom.io
* Click DOWNLOAD
* Install it
* When it opens the first time, you'll get all manner of welcome screens, etc. Close them
* Click FILE >> NEW FILE
* If you don't want your lines going all the way across the screen, click VIEW >> TOGGLE SOFT WRAP
* You're good to go. Start typing
_If you want to download a specific version, because you're a nerd, visit the Github repository and take your pick._
WORKING WITH PROJECT FOLDERS
If I'm working on a multiple-document project, or writing some awful code, I like to see all the relevant files in one place. That way, I can quickly scan for related images, content, or scripts, without interrupting my flow. Atom lets me do just that:

Atom Project Folders

To view an entire folder:
* Click FILE >> OPEN
* Navigate to the folder you want to open
* Instead of clicking a file, click OPEN

Open a folder in Atom

Atom then opens the desired folder, listing all files contained in it:

Yesss! I opened a folder!

Now you can jump between files without clicking File >> Open.
_You can also add other folders to a project. I'm not going to talk about that here._
SETTING UP FOR MARKDOWN
Of course, I'm a Markdown fanatic. You should be, too.
Atom is a kick-ass Markdown writing, editing, preview, and conversion tool, all in one. You have to do a little setup, but it's easy.
OPEN ATOM'S PACKAGE MANAGER
Atom has thousands of packages--think of them as plugins--available at https://atom.io/packages. You can install them using the package manager:
* On OS X, click ATOM >> PREFERENCES.
* Click Packages
If you're on Windows, click PACKAGES >> SETTINGS VIEW >> OPEN.
You'll see something like this:

Atom Package Manager

You're ready to install the packages you need for Markdown.
INSTALL MARKDOWN PACKAGES
Atom Markdown packages number in the dozens. But I find I only need three:
language-markdownmarkdown-writermarkdown-preview
They add nifty things like Markdown syntax highlighting:

Atom Markdown Syntax Highlighting

And autonumbered lists:

Markdown lists, just like that

And let you preview your document without leaving Atom:

Markdown Preview in Atom

To install:
* Open the Package Manager
* Open Settings
* Click INSTALL (on OS X) or OPEN (on Windows)
* Search for the package you want. In this case, type "Markdown" into the search box
* Choose the packages and click INSTALL
Markdown installs the package. You're good to go.
SETTING UP A DOCUMENT, MY WAY
It's time to start writing. Here's how I do it:
IF YOU ARE WRITING A SIMPLE DOCUMENT
If you're writing a single document that won't include other files like images:
* Start Atom
* Create a new file
* Save the file as FILENAME.md, where FILENAME is whatever you name the file. The .md extension tells Atom this is a Markdown file. Atom will apply the right packages and syntax highlighting
IF YOUR PROJECT WILL CONTAIN MULTIPLE FILES
If you are writing a multiple-file document--like a multiple-chapter book--or will be including other files like images, start with a folder:
* Create a new folder on your computer. This folder will hold all of your files
* Start Atom
* Open the folder in which your document currently lives or will live
* Create and save a new file as above
OPENING PREVIEW
I use markdown-preview so I can see how my document looks without leaving Atom:

Markdown Preview in Atom: Cool, huh?

To use it, you need to toggle Preview. There are keyboard shortcuts, but the easiest way is clicking PACKAGES >> MARKDOWN PREVIEW >> TOGGLE PREVIEW:

Toggling Markdown Preview

CONVERTING MARKDOWN TO HTML
For delivery, you probably need to convert Markdown to something else:
* Toggle markdown-preview so that you can see the document preview
* Right-click in any BLANK area of the preview. Otherwise, Atom will copy the word or image instead of the entire document
* Click COPY AS HTML…
* Paste the result wherever you need it
That's it. You've got HTML.
TONS OF OTHER FEATURES
Atom lets you install lots of other packages, customize your theme, change fonts, etc. etc. and so forth. Feel free to explore. My only caution: Like any software, the more packages/plugins you add, the slower and more prone to errors Atom gets. Be somewhat picky.
SO SIMPLE
Compare this whole install process to, say, installing Microsoft Word. Which takes longer?
Uh-huh. That's what I thought. And that's why I love working with Atom and Markdown. It's SIMPLE. Give it a shot.
If you have questions or suggestions, leave a comment.
The post How to Set Up & Use Atom as a Markdown Editor appeared first on Portent.

Search engine advertising is a critical piece of the marketing puzzle for all businesses, but can be especially useful in an industry that is as competitive as Law or other professional services. This post looks at some of the specific opportunities and pitfalls for professional services firms, focusing on Law, but there are plenty of lessons to draw for any business that’s in a competitive space.
PPC marketing gives professional services firms, especially law firms an opportunity to get in front of potential customers at the exact right moment like no other channel can. You need to be highly visible at the precise moment that a need for your specific service arises. And because you’re ostensibly focusing your spending on only the critical moments, it’s possible to be successful with any type of budget.

A well-managed PPC account can be the difference between a growing law firm and just waiting around for the phone to ring.

Despite all the possible benefits, law firms face many unique challenges in PPC that make it more difficult to advertise profitably than in other industries. Keywords (the building blocks for user searches and ad targeting on Google) in the law industry rank amongst the most expensive, with “attorney” and “lawyer” costing over $40 per click!
There is also incredibly high competition by geography, by practice type, and by the event that has people looking in the first place, making it even more challenging to get your ads in front of the right audience at a cost that you can sustain.
These challenges could make PPC look intimidating or risky, but there are some tips and strategies that’ll help you run a successful PPC campaign for your law firm without breaking the bank.
1: USE NARROW MATCH KEYWORDS
Let’s say you wanted your ad to show up for the search “defense attorney”.
Would you be willing pay $50 to show your ad to someone who just searched the phrase “the U.S. ATTORNEY general visited the DEFENSE department”? I doubt it.
But as obvious as this seems, that’s exactly what could and often does happen if you don’t use “narrow match” keywords.
When starting an account, the default option for keywords (picking the searches you’ll show up for) is called “broad match.” Broad match can be useful for huge volume, but it also allows any search that includes your keywords in ANY ORDER to see the ad (see above example).
With keywords as expensive and competitive as you find in the law industry, using broad match is just asking to lose money. There’s simply too much out of your control, with costs per click that can tank your entire advertising budget before you catch the problem. Our goal is to get the ads in front of the people _most_ likely to click, and to convert, and as a rule using broad match simply shows your ads in too many irrelevant places.
To improve the quality of traffic and use your budget at the right moments, you want to use narrow match keywords in general. This is so important for targeting in search engine marketing that Google gives you a couple of flavors: Phrase Match, and Exact Match. We’ll skim both.
Phrase Match only allows searches that have your keywords present in the specific order. “Yada Yada Defense Attorney Yada Yada.” Alternatively, “Seattle DEFENSE ATTORNEY” or “DEFENSE ATTORNEY Seattle”. You get the idea.
Exact Match targeting will tighten your criteria to the absolute max so that only exactly matching searches will see your ad (hence the name). Now “Yada Yada Defense Attorney” gives us nothing. It’s “DEFENSE ATTORNEY” only in this case.
By setting your target keywords to Phrase or Exact Match, you can narrow down to only the users who are searching for legal help, and for a practice like yours. This leads to more qualified clicks, and saves a bunch of money in the process.
2: USE LONG TAIL KEYWORDS
So now that we’ve tightened up our targeting, we’re done, right? Not at all. Now we need to focus on potential clients that seem highly motivated from what they’re searching on Google.
If you’re looking to get the most bang for your buck, it’s not good enough to bid on keywords like “defense attorney”, even if that’s exactly what you are. By competing directly with _every_ other defense attorney in the world, you’re still going to show up for irrelevant searches. More importantly, it’s going to cost you a _lot_ of money.
The solution? Long-tail keywords.
Say you're a Seattle-based attorney who specializes in workman’s compensation in the energy sector. Would you rather pay money to show your ad to two people who searched “workman’s compensation” or “attorney”, or one person who searched “workman’s compensation attorney seattle”?
Instead of targeting more general keywords, try thinking about what else someone could add to a search that would make your firm the best option.
Even something as simple as adding the location, like “SEATTLE workman’s comp attorney” can lead to much higher engagement from potential customers at a much more affordable price. When on a tight budget, long tail keywords are one of your greatest weapons to compete with bigger, less focused firms.
3: NEGATIVE KEYWORDS
But again, long-tail or narrow match keywords alone are still not enough. Let’s stay with our workman’s compensation attorney. You want your ads in front of people who NEED a workman’s comp attorney, not people who want to _BECOME_ a workman’s comp attorney.
Even when using narrow match keywords such as “workman’s comp attorney”, your ads can still show for people searching things like “WORKMAN’S COMP attorney salary”. Few things are more frustrating than seeing your advertising budget blown on searches that obviously aren’t relevant to your business or the right kind of intent. This happens to the best of us, and can be avoided by using negative keywords.
Workman’s comp attorney SALARY
For many of the firms that we work with, our negative keyword lists consist of other _types_ of attorneys, searches that indicate low buying intent or even frivolous claims.
This often includes words such as “salary” or “Glassdoor”, city names that you do not serve, and other attorney’s names.
Bottom line you save your advertising budget for high-quality searches that have the best chance of becoming leads for your firm. You don’t have to add every city and competitor right away if you’re strapped for time, but make sure to check your search terms often to catch any irrelevant keywords that show up.
4: SPECIFIC GEOTARGETING
Say every click you receive on your ad costs $10. Now, what if you found out that people within ten miles of your business are twice as likely to turn into leads than people more than 20 miles away?
Would you still want to pay the same amount for those people? I didn’t think so. If you are a local business, and many law firms are just that, it’s incredibly valuable to set up specific geotargeting.
Not only will geotargeting allow you to bid less for searches outside of your market, but you can choose to bid more aggressively for searches in close proximity. Just one more opportunity to get your ads in front of the right people without spending more money overall.
Without geotargeting, you would be bidding the same amount to advertise your firm to someone searching 100 miles away as someone standing 100 feet away from your front door.
5: UTILIZE BID MODIFIERS
I make this point further down the page, not because it's less important, but because it's the one tip that you can’t implement right out of the gate.
Like geotargeting, if you found out that people on their phone were twice as likely to convert as people on desktops, would you still pay the same price to show them an ad? For many workman’s comp or employee injury searches that happen quickly and away from home, this is exactly the behavior we see.
Under the settings tab in Google AdWords, there is a “Devices” page where you can see performance metrics for every device where your ad has shown in the past. This includes desktops, mobile with or without full browsers, and tablets with or without full browsers.

Once you get enough data from running your PPC ads, you can look at this Devices page and see what device has the best performance metrics. Make sure that you can see which ads are turning into good leads, and not just clicks. If for instance your mobile site isn’t effective, or mobile searches just don’t convert for other reasons, there’s no reason to increase your budget or bids here until you know what’s going on with clear conversion tracking.
Just like geotargeting, you can bid depending on performance and get your ads in front of the most relevant people on the most relevant platform.
If you'd like to learn more about PPC bid modifiers in general we've written and spoken about this over the past few years.
6. TRACK CONVERSIONS RELIGIOUSLY – CALL-ONLY ADS
Legal questions are complicated. People want to talk with someone that understands and can answer their questions. They also trust people more when they can talk.
If you’re “stealing leads” from your website by putting up your general phone number and not tracking how many people call that because of your PPC ads, you’ll never understand how your marketing spend was working to drive new business. That’s why we use Call-Only ads.
Call-Only ads look similar to regular AdWords ads, but they display your phone number instead of a standard headline.

Not my actual number, and not my actual job.

If a phone call is your primary conversion, Call-Only Ads gives you the simplest way of tracking them. In these ads, clicks don’t take the user to the website. Instead, a click calls your phone directly. This removes many steps of the conversions funnel, taking users right from Google to your phone line.
Naturally, this only works on mobile. But for firms that rely on phone calls, Call-Only ads make it _FAR_ easier to track and generate leads.
SUMMARY
In the law and professional services industry, PPC can be a game-changer when it comes to lead generation. But despite its appeal, there are many factors that can make it extremely easy to waste money if you’re not careful. Expensive keywords and high competition make it challenging to maximize effectiveness. But if you narrow down your keyword selections, target your location, optimize for the device and utilize Call-Only ads, you’ll be well on your way to driving traffic and leads for your business.
The post How to Use PPC For Law Firm Lead Generation - SEM Lessons for Professional Services Firms appeared first on Portent.

_This is another excerpt from an upcoming e-book on finding actionable, cross-channel opportunities in your data. We use Google Analytics (GA) for this, but you can use any platform. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: The tool you use isn’t as important as the discipline of combing through data regularly and finding something you can move on. _
-------------------------

When you think about big data and data science in general, you imagine a team of Python and R geeks in a room with a data warehouse, several instances of Tableau, and a mandate from the C-Suite to find the next huge thing that’ll make the company millions.

But when you’re a marketing manager at a startup, you might be missing "one or two" of those analytics luxuries. Yet you’re still tasked with pulling money-making ideas out of that sea of early customer and prospect data.
This is just one example that’ll help you scale down data mining exercises to fit your routine as a marketer and unearth quick wins for your company.
WHERE TO LOOK IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS
It can be daunting to log in to GA if you're not living in it every day. Google is constantly changing the UI and there’s an ever-growing list of reports in the navigation tree. It’s hard to know where to begin. And that’s where the search bar comes in.
I typically start with the Source/Medium report. Start typing “Source/Medium” in the search bar and it’ll whittle down the giant list of reports available in GA to a manageable list of, well, one report.
Once you’ve successfully pulled up the report, scroll down to the table and minimize the navigation bar on the left so that you can focus on the data at hand.
One major thing is amiss in this example table: Portent is not a retail business, so looking at our eCommerce Conversions isn’t helpful. Thankfully, there’s a drop down that’ll allow you to choose a better goal as a lens to evaluate your different traffic sources.
We’re a business that uses our website to generate leads for our sales team, so I’ll select “Contact Us - Main Form” from the drop down. That form garners the lion’s share of our web inquiries every month.

Adjust Google Analytics to focus on the metrics that drive *your* business. Default is not your friend.

With that set, we can begin looking for traffic sources that could really shine with a bit more effort.
SETTING YOUR METRICS CRITERIA
If you’ve been with your organization for longer than a year, you should know the channels that drive tons of leads. For us, it’s Organic search — turns out, we practice what we preach in SEO — followed by Direct visits after folks hear one of our subject matter experts speak at a conference.
While that’s great information, your boss will probably also know what’s obviously working. We’re not interested in “obvious” for today’s exercise. What we want are traffic sources that are unsung heroes in your marketing mix.
A few criteria will help you identify these opportunities:
* They’ll generate less than 1% of your total Users today
* Those Users will Bounce at less than half of your site average
* More Importantly, those Users will engage with content at over double your site average rate
* Vitally, those Users will convert at over double your site average
Sort descending on the table by your primary conversion and it’ll surface more of these sources.
_TIP: You can also add “Full Referrer” as a Secondary Dimension. This isn’t always necessary, but if one particular page on another site is sending you better qualified traffic than another, the Full Referrer will show you that._
Well, that didn’t take long. Right away, you can see a potential diamond in the rough.
Referrals from a site called UpCity are generating:
* A tiny amount of traffic at present (0.01% of our Users)
* With lower Bounce Rates (29% compared to 86% site average)
* Lots of engagement with our content; nearly 3x the usual rate (3.57 pages/session compared to 1.26 site average)
* And conversion rates way higher than the norm (29% compared to 0.07% for this particular conversion)
Yes, it’s only 2 conversions. Not exactly an earth-shattering volume of leads. But depending on the quality of the leads, that could be huge for us. Besides, we’re not concerned about volume here. We’re looking for sources that could convert at much higher rates if given more focus and, potentially, monetary investment.
This traffic source definitely requires further investigation.
RESEARCHING THE OPPORTUNITY IN-DEPTH
A quick visit to UpCity shows that it’s a directory of digital marketing consultants and professionals.
Going on a quick tangent over to SimilarWeb shows that UpCity has a monthly traffic clip of around 275K visits. Yes it's a paid placement opportunity, but the traffic is performing so well that it's a heck of a lot more interesting than starting with a Google search of "_where could I advertise my business?_"

SimilarWeb is a great tool for evaluating the raw size of an opportunity youve surfaced.

We need to ascertain how people are finding us on UpCity in order to see if we can build the traffic we’re receiving from this site in any way. So I’ll do a quick search for SEO professionals in Seattle, where we’re based.

Take the time to understand where and how you appear

It took me a little while to find our listing, which is probably why we get less than 10 Users per month here. Our listing was on the second page of results about halfway down.
But many of these directory sites have a way we can get our listing featured in a certain section and/or make it stand out from the bunch with a badge. Under their Partners section, they have a pricing page.
Low and behold, there’s an option to become an UpCity Certified Partner for $100/month. Testing this out for a month would help us determine how much more traffic we can generate from this site, and importantly whether or not it’ll engage and convert at the same rate as the existing traffic we’ve gotten from them.

Dont ignore paid opportunities that you surface. Proven high performing traffic is gold, even if you have to pay a bit to get more.

THE SAME APPROACH HOLDS FOR EARNED MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES
If this page had proven to be a linked mention in another site’s blog (earned media) from a PR effort, rather than an advertising opportunity (paid media) we might do some different things to capitalize:
* Evaluate the link-worthy content we produced and promote it to similar sites
* Look at the prominence of our backlink on the external site. Do we have any other great pieces of content that might merit another mention to move us up the page? Could we produce them if not?
* Look at the topic of the referring page. Was there a specific interest or goal that visitors had when they arrived? How could we better serve that need with the destination page on our own site to increase conversion?
But the process of discovering the opportunity is identical.
MAKING OPPORTUNITY GAP ANALYSIS A HABIT
That was just one small example and a hypothetical from a B2B standpoint. It took me less than 10 minutes to identify and now I have something to take back to my team and test.
It doesn't matter whether the find is paid or earned, it matters that you're looking for the wins, and capitalizing on them.
Portent does this type of analytics work every day for our clients, but you can start by doing this once a week on a slower afternoon.
All it takes is putting aside any fears you have in getting lost in your analytics tool, setting a metric threshold to narrow your search, and then evaluating the opportunities you find to see if there’s a way to expand on them.
In the next excerpt, we’ll look at identifying longer term opportunities that take more effort, but until then: _HAPPY DATA HUNTING!_
The post How to Find Quick Win Opportunities in Google Analytics appeared first on Portent.

At Portent, we often get asked to advise on _the_ ideal marketing team structure. The answer is almost always ‘it depends.’ Today though, we’re talking about something almost universally true for the mindset of successful marketing teams. Whether you see one person in each role here, or ten, this approach will make any team work more cohesively. For instance, you can have a number of specialists that work in defined hierarchies, silos, or you may have teams that are relatively flat.
Here at Portent, I'm always amazed at how collaborative and encouraging our client teams are. Team dynamics hit home with me. In my spare time, I coach a team of outrigger canoe paddlers.
I’ll use this to outline some of the lessons about how to run an effective marketing team, even when you’re not in charge. If you’re Thalassophobic, you can always skip to the takeaways.
(The Seattle Outrigger crew. Also, new Portent theme-song, anyone??)
So, what the heck is an outrigger canoe?
If you're a fan of "how-many-times-has-McGarret-been-shot?" cop dramas, then you might have seen one on _Hawaii 5-0_. If you’ve spent time on any of the Hawaiian islands, you’ve likely encountered one. The Polynesian wa'a or va'a go way back in history. Canoe racing is the state sport of Hawai'i, and its popularity is gaining. There are racing clubs across the U.S., from Washington D.C. to L.A, with stops in places like Austin in between. There are major races in Sydney and Hong Kong. It’s crazy fun, and it's a heck of a lot better workout than paddleboarding.

So how do you get a team of individuals to race 40 miles in the ocean consistently well, when the ocean itself is incredibly inconsistent, and what does this have to do with marketing leadership?

In a six-person outrigger canoe, each seat has a responsibility based on that person's skill level and experience. Some roles are better suited to generalists, while some are decidedly more specialized. It's important to note that much like a flat organization of people with T-shaped skillsets, everyone here _at least_ knows how to paddle. When a paddler first begins the sport, it may seem that all they have to do is get in a seat and move the boat forward. However, as they grow with the sport, they find that each seat has responsibilities that go beyond individual effort.
More importantly, each seat has a set of eyes and ears. Input here is key. While a boat full of people yelling at one another is a bad thing, a collaborative, communicative canoe that knows the right way to use individual skills and collective awareness will thrive.
Below you'll find a few things that can help your digital marketing team run like a fast outrigger canoe!
SEAT ONE - THE STROKE
While not necessarily the leader of the boat, the stroke sets the pace. Keenly aware, this person can _feel_ how the boat is running, and can often see the big obstacles before anyone else. He or she will receive input from others on the team and is empowered to make pacing decisions that will affect everyone's outcome. This person is an individual contributor, though it is very important that this person have a feel for the pulse of the boat. And while they may ultimately defer to a rate set by a steersman or captain, this person is quick to communicate clearly and loudly to the team behind him when there is danger or a better way forward.

There are times when you will have to lead your boat even when you're not in charge of it. Be aware of the conditions, listen to your team, and find the right pace. They'll get you where you want to go.

SEAT TWO
Balance and timing are critical to a smooth-running canoe. Balance is attained by having paddlers stagger the side they’re paddling on. Odd-numbered seats follow seat one, and even numbers follow two. Therefore, seat two must transmit the rate exactly as she sees it. This effectively makes seat two the stroke for her side of the boat. Yes, she has to follow the lead from seat one, but you had best believe that this person is providing constant feedback on what is working and what isn't. A stroke can get caught up in a runaway rate or even paddle too slow at times. Seat two will offer actionable feedback.

Everyone has a hand in leading their part of the project. Individual contributors have their own deadlines and may need to solicit help from or offer feedback to other teammates. This can help with project pacing and a killer end result.

SEAT THREE – THE CAPTAIN IN THE MIDDLE?
Depending on who you talk to, the captain of the boat is usually the steersperson who sits all the way in the back. This person plots the course, calls for sprints, and generally encourages the boat. However, there are teams that are now offloading some of these tasks to another I.C.: Seat Three. Previously, this person was often tasked with shouting out a command that notified paddlers when to switch sides. Now the role has expanded to include rate increases based on competitive and environmental conditions. This increase in responsibility means that the steersperson can concentrate on where the boat is going rather than worrying that the boat is keeping up with the conditions. A veteran boat with a seasoned seat three will instinctively speed up to catch a wave.

When you have a well-trained and savvy team, you can start assigning out additional responsibilities to individual contributors. With an eye to the strategy, these team members challenge themselves to work smarter and more efficiently.

SEAT FOUR
Seat four is known as one of the ‘power positions.’ Power positions are typically seats three and four (and sometimes five). While this individual contributor may be tasked with heavy lifting, a nose-down, get-it-done type of role, their input is invaluable. The work these people output cannot be overlooked, so periodic check-in is suggested. Make sure they’re not burning out and that they have what they need to sustain all the way to the finish line.

There are many challenges in each race to the finish. Even the most stalwart contributor can encounter project fatigue or other blockers. Be sure to know when you need to check-in.

SEAT FIVE
Growth is good, and planning for the future is vital for continued success. In an outrigger canoe, some seats are better suited for beginners or promising understudies. Seat five is a prime example. If you had a boat full of experienced paddlers and needed to integrate a novice, you might consider placing that person here. He or she doesn’t need to pass the rate along, by virtue of their spot. This person also sits right near the steersperson / captain who can give direct input. However, for bigger undertakings seat five should _ideally_ be a budding or experienced steersman himself. You want this person to be able to assist in a pinch.
In big waves (as with major projects), it can help to have another steersman who can assist with keeping the boat balanced and, frankly, upright. If a project is big enough, having an assistant project manager along to assist with steering at critical moments is essential. Your five-seat knows the leader’s role as well as his own, and the minute the boat is off-balance he knows it and shifts seamlessly from strong individual contributor to a second steersman.

Giving up some of the responsibility to an up and coming leader not only provides stability, but gives them fantastic room to grow and train.

SEAT SIX - THE STEERSMAN / CAPTAIN / PROJECT MANAGER / THE GUY IN THE BACK / STRATEGIST
The “steersman” is tasked with getting the boat from point A to point B, and plots course and plan of action in advance. Just like any leader, she will likely encounter many obstacles or barriers that will need her attention. Winds change, currents shift, and people in her boat might find themselves fatigued or distracted. In addition, seat six is also a paddler.
If her boat is completely out-of-whack, she’ll need to make frequent course corrections (different, less-powerful adjustment strokes or drag-inducing pokes), and these keep her from actually paddling. The steersman must look at the boat as a whole, the factors affecting it and take corrective action. A smart steersman lets her paddlers know what’s going on, encourages those that need it, and relies on input from them. This synergy of information flow makes for a smooth-running boat that can go hard for miles and finish strong.

Takeaway – Marketing team leaders know what's happening and where the boat is going. They will guide the team with encouragement and by soliciting feedback from the team

WHERE TO FROM HERE?
Your team is smart, and they’re even smarter as a whole. They can collectively see when they’re biting off too much or moving too fast to be successful over the long-term. Be demanding as a leader, or as a highly skilled and highly collaborative I.C., but listen to the natural feedback. You can lead in any number of ways, but before you start shouting caution, direction, or pace, get in sync with your team. They’ll appreciate it, and you’ll win together for years.
The post How to Lead in Marketing When You're Not the Captain of the Boat appeared first on Portent.

AMAZON MARKETING: WHY IT'S IMPORTANT
There are hundreds of millions of active accounts on Amazon. Moreover, nearly half of internet shoppers go directly to Amazon instead of starting with a search engine like Google when they are looking to make a purchase. Those are staggering numbers. But chances are you don’t need convincing that Amazon is a channel worth pursuing if you sell online.
The real question is how to approach it and how to succeed. Competition on Amazon is high and just posting your listing isn’t going to mean sales.
With Amazon, the name of the game is visibility. Specifically, premium visibility and how to get it. Amazon is a search engine. Just like Google, it uses an algorithm to decide who should rank and who shouldn’t for queries or particular product searches. That said, it is its own platform with its own rules defined by Amazonians, NOT Googlers. It absolutely needs to be treated with a different strategy to win this unique game.
But there are certainly lessons to be drawn from search engine advertising.
How do we generally produce visibility in Google search? With search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising (PPC). These same broad concepts apply to Amazon.
AMAZON SEO
The first step to SEO for Amazon is understanding how Amazon’s search algorithm works. That is easier said than done, but if you’re going to understand the algorithm, you need to understand what Amazon’s real goal is. It’s different than Google or Bing’s.
More traditional search engines design their algorithms as a way to, as Google puts it, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That’s a nice way of saying they want to rank and present pages in order of their quality and usefulness for _any_ search so that people can find the _information_ they need and continue searching on Google’s owned properties.
Amazon’s goal, on the other hand, is to help people find the _products_ they need so they can BUY and keep shopping on Amazon. The word "buy" is the important part here. Amazon is a shopping engine (for now). It wants its users to buy things so its sellers can sell things so Amazon can make money. Send the package ridiculously fast. Drive a review or two. Rinse and repeat.
Everything facet of their algorithm considers this simple end goal of driving the sale.
So, what is Amazon looking at to help people find and buy what they want and need?
PERFORMANCE AND SALES: The algorithm looks at things like CTR (click-thru rate) in the search results, conversion rate once users view a listing, and yes, sales.
RELEVANCE: The algorithm looks at how well a product listing matches the query that a user types into the search bar.
Begging the more _actionable_ question: How do I improve those ranking factors for my listing?
KEYWORDS ARE KING
Much like Google in the not-too-distant past, keywords are a big part of what you can do or control to start ranking better. So, how do you know which keywords matter to Amazon and to those millions of your prospective, future customers? Keyword research.
Keyword research is a foundational part of all SEO, but Amazon keyword research is a little different. And it’s not just Amazon. This is true for all shopping engines. People search differently when they are on Amazon or in a true product-seeking mindset than they might on Google when they’re seeking early information about your category. There is likely to be some overlap, but it is important to use keyword research tools that are meant for shopping.
Here are a few keyword research tools to consider:
* MerchantWords
* SellerLabs
* KeywordTool.io
* Terapeak SEO
Once you have a strong keyword list informed by how people are actually searching on Amazon, you’ll need to figure out how to leverage that insight.
KEYWORD PLACEMENT MATTERS
Location, location, location! Your title is the prime real estate for optimizing your listing. And not just technically speaking, but for real humans scanning real results.
The next most important placement is your product description. Followed by your backend keywords, which have a strict character count. Your bullets matter too, but more for UX than for strict technical optimization.
Again, the point is to start with a good grasp on what matters most and to let that guide how your listing is constructed, with a heavy dose of common sense about writing clearly, concisely, and engagingly for real humans. There should be a method to the madness.
AMAZON MARKETING REQUIRES STRONG UX
Designing and writing your listing for the end-user will also directly affect your ability to rank well. Blatant keyword stuffing as a practice is thankfully still on the trash-pile of search engine history. _Shoes shoes shoes, tennis shoes, shoes shoes… _
Having things like high quality product images may seem obvious but it’s exactly this attention to detail and deliberately providing great product information in all forms that will earn you a click and ultimately a sale over someone else. Here’s a short list of UX related considerations:
* Image quality
* Image variations (different views, pictures on a model, etc)
* Clear and descriptive product titles
* Detailed descriptions and product specifications
* High rating
* Good reviews
* Free shipping
* Available on Prime?
* Competitive pricing
Some of these things you’ll be able to control more than others, but you should do what you can to put a good foot forward and earn a shoppers’ trust as quickly as possible. This boils down to looking credible through both polish and social proof, and yes, giving them what they need to make a decision.
AMAZON VISIBILITY ISN’T SOMETHING YOU “FIX” - IT’S SOMETHING YOU WORK AT
Just like other forms of SEO, you are never truly "done" optimizing. This kind of effort towards best-possible visibility is all about Distance from Perfect, a concept we talk about a lot at Portent.
Continue to iterate. Amazon’s algorithm will absolutely continue to change over time as they learn and improve, so make sure your marketing team or your agency is current on what’s happening to stay ahead of your competition.
AMAZON PPC
As with just about everything in digital marketing these days, sometimes you need to pay to play. This is especially true for new products without a lot of historical sales to provide lift organically.
Amazon Sponsored Products are a very effective way to get people to your listing and boost sales in a targeted and cost-efficient way. Amazon’s PPC service is similar to Google AdWords in that it is keyword-driven and uses a CPC (cost per click) auction model. The ad targeting options available, combined with the “buy” mentality of Amazon users make it an easy choice for serious Amazon sellers.
Sponsored products aren’t just for new products either. Yes, it’s a great way to get products off the ground, but it can also be highly effective for seasonal campaigns and for providing an overall lift when organic sales aren’t meeting short-term revenue goals.
CAN SPONSORED PRODUCTS IMPROVE MY ORGANIC RANKING?
In a word: Yes. Although it’s not as simple as an ad spend “dragging” a lagging search result up the page, the visibility and extra sales from paid will mean a better organic rank in the future. Think of it as proactively creating momentum for your organic listing.
HOW TO RUN ADS ON AMAZON
Sponsored Products can be found and mentioned in Seller Central. As described above, Sponsored Product ads are fairly similarly to AdWords in terms of how you can manage them, For instance, you can (and very likely should) create campaigns and ad groups to target keywords with max CPC bids.
It’s worth noting that AdWords controls are more robust than Amazon’s at this point, with a several-year head start, although Amazon seems to be investing heavily to make up ground. Whatever your take on the interface, the important thing to remember here is still that keywords are king.
The keyword research you already did on the SEO side can and should influence the keywords you target with your paid ads on Amazon. You know what they’re searching, so unless it’s cost prohibitive (ad costs minus your specific margins) you know exactly where you’d ideally like to show up.
Importantly, and just like AdWords, “negative keywords” (those terms that signify a search for a product where you’re not a good fit, are also an important tool for Amazon PPC. Be sure to invest a bit of time early-on to develop a strong negative keyword list to help narrow your targeting. This will improve efficiency and prevent wasteful spending. Focus on showing up when you’re truly the best fit, and invest to make sure you’re highly visible in those moments.
WHERE DO AMAZON ADS SHOW UP?
This might sound well and good, but without the context of what this ultimately looks like, it can be tough to connect the “I should…” with the real end result.
Just like Google, Amazon ads are usually given some of the most premium real-estate on the entire site. This means they will be the first thing a shopper will see.
Not only do paid or sponsored results give you a shot at the top of each search results page, they can also be seen directly on other seller’s product pages. That’s a pretty significant advantage over traditional search when it comes to merchandising, if we do say so.
IS AMAZON ADVERTISING EASY ENOUGH TO HANDLE SOLO?
The reality here is that Amazon is a _highly_ competitive marketplace because the upside volume is simply unmatched. Achieving high ranking and driving sales doesn’t happen by accident. Whether you’re opening a job req for an internal staffer, or looking to your agency partner, it’s generally a very good idea to have someone familiar with both SEO, paid search management, and Amazon’s platform-specifics managing your presence.
Shameless plug: if you aren’t sure whether your Amazon products and presence would benefit from professional help, contact us or read more about how Portent helps sellers on Amazon here.
The post Where To Start With Amazon Marketing appeared first on Portent.

WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOG TO BRING YOU THIS HALLOWEEN-THEMED SEO LESSON.

Meet Tilly, a Portent pup. I could make a cloaking joke here, but its too easy.

When your team is full of brilliant SEOs and digital marketers, Halloween bake-offs (and pretty much every other holiday function) risk getting into the deep end of the nerd pool pretty quickly. The Portent team had already put together a blog post for today, but when SEO Strategist Amanda Putney brought in this batch of home-made cupcakes, all bets were off.
And although these SEO tactics are long-buried, crawling with worms, and hopefully never coming back as zombies, we'll throw in a link for the folks who are still somehow using them. And for the rest of you, a little black hat nostalgia.
THE (TIMELY) DEMISE OF META KEYWORDS
Yoast has a good write-up about the life and death of the erstwhile Meta Keywords tag. One of the good old favorites for keyword stuffing, in the dark times of yore.
THE INVISIBLE MAN: HIDDEN TEXT
At this point, if you're still deliberately using hidden text for SEO (how is this not completely dead yet?!), and you _actually_ manage to get the text past Google's extremely sophisticated crawler, you're essentially begging for a manual search penalty. SCARY!
Hopefully this one is pure nostalgia for everyone that actually reads the Portent blog. If not, and I'll assume you're new here, Search Engine Journal does a solid rundown about this dead tactic.
LINK FARMS ABANDONED AND FULL OF ZOMBIES

Reaching way back into the Moz Whiteboard Friday archives to 2009, Rand does a great job of explaining why link farming was so bad for SEO. As with everything else here, if you're still somehow caught up in a link-farming scheme, we'll see you when it's time to recover from the inevitable penalty.
'TWAS GOOGLE KILLED THE DOORWAY PAGE

Designed to rank well for particular phrases or keywords, these pages are so often used by spammy operators that Google had no choice but to slay the doorway page.
THE BOG OF SPAM BLOGS
Going back to Wikipedia for a definition on this one, Spam Blogs are among the walking dead that still crop up until they're righteously slain, but they typically have pretty short lives before they're detected these days. Typically announcing their presence with a blood curdling "Greetings of the day," your best bet is to steer very clear lest you be affected as well.
CLOAKING: EVEN DRACULA WON'T TOUCH IT ANYMORE

A violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines, cloaking or sneaky redirects boil down to attempting to show users something different than a search engine crawler. While some argue that there are still reasonable use cases for "white hat cloaking", it's probably a better idea to be straightforward with both your human visitors and the occasional creepy search engine spider.
AUTHORSHIP, WE BARELY KNEW YE.
_"QUOTH THE GOOGLE: NEVERMORE."_

Amanda didnt make a cupcake about Authorship. Were going to have a talk about her continued employment at Portent.

A tale of woe about Google Authorship. Working title: "The Raven." or "Why SEOs Can't Have Nice Things."
Possibly one of the more tragic stories here, the concept authorship had a bright future. Alas, the blood suckers got hold of it as will sometimes happen. The only solution: a quick stake to the heart.
THE KEYWORD STUFF MARSHMALLOW MAN!

As much as I would love to end this on a post that's all tombstones and brain-hungry zombies, this article from 2015 on the Contently blog is a great way to think about how SEO has changed since the days when all these tactics were commonplace, including the demise of keyword stuffing.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
We could do this all day, seriously. But sadly we're out of cupcakes and it's time for a game of Werewolf. Which ironically is all about convincing people you're not the evil one they're looking for. Perhaps there's a bit of black hat somewhere inside the Portent soul after all…
The post The Grim Specter of SEO Past - Happy Halloween from Portent appeared first on Portent.